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Wednesday, April 18, 2018

I'm Back From Vacation

Hi everyone, I am back from a vacation. I certainly appreciate all of the well wishes pertaining to my retirement.

I am rethinking the format and content of the blog and will announce it when that process is finished.

Wheat in Butler County, Kansas, east of Wichita

In the meantime, I have some thoughts I wish to pass along:

There was a lot of record-setting "weather" while I was away. Record late season snows with cold temperatures, tornadoes, and floods. In just about every case where someone posted a great photo, there were companies asking to use the photos for a credit only. In other words, free. Weather photos are rare and valuable; speaking for myself I would never allow NBC, The Weather Channel or other organizations to use my photo(s) free.

There was a series of strong tornadoes (F-2 and F-3) in North Carolina and Virginia associated with a squall line on April 15. The Storm Prediction Center did a good job forecasting them. The thought occurred to me that, perhaps, some in meteorology don't pay enough attention to diagnosing and forecasting this type of tornado as opposed to the supercell-type tornadoes that are more common in the Great Plains. There is a tornado research program currently in progress in the Southeast that I hope will result in even better forecasts and warnings.

While I was gone, the American Meteorological Society published a curious paper in its push to advance the global warming narrative. The paper is here. It is an entirely model-based paper: Actual rains and temperatures are not considered! It makes such statements as: A simple projection of the current farm economy–AI relations into the future predicts that farm size will need to increase across the plains, but especially in the south, and that in the northern plains there will be a shift toward wheat cultivation and away from corn. The authors don't seem to realize the Great Plains is already wheat country, rather than corn country, and has been that way for generations. I wonder if perhaps the authors, who are based in New York and Pennsylvania, have watched South Pacific too many times ("I'm as corny as Kansas in August...").

For a quarter-century, Big Climate has been forecasting an agricultural catastrophe due to global warming. From these actual numbers (not a model), warming has been a boon for agriculture.